When the Papua New Guinean supreme court brought down its widely anticipated decision that the Manus offshore detention centre was illegal, everyone’s first reaction was to pass the buck.
Photograph: Refugee Action Coalition/AAP

Two of Australia’s most shameful political failures – asylum and climate policy – are back in the news. Labor has had another stab at a climate policy – half brave, half cautious and vague, but certainly more credible than the current government’s fig leaf of a “plan”. And the PNG government has called time on the festering human rights catastrophe that is Manus Island, a development that left both parties gawpingly devoid of answers.

Each of these failures has been driven by politics.

Australian climate policy is at near crisis point because it can be solved only with a degree of bipartisanship, absent in the past seven years of brain-dead fact-free sense-paralysing conflict. Asylum policy is already at crisis point because the leading parties are in a bipartisan death lock that refuses to acknowledge the human and moral cost of achieving the stop-every-single-boat objective.

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But instead of discussing how we got ourselves into these messes or how we might get out of them – what the climate policy might actually mean for the economy or the environment, or what the Manus decision by the PNG supreme court might mean for the poor souls we’ve left languishing there – politicians and some commentators leap straight over the detail and discuss how the developments will “play” in the political “game” of the imminent election campaign. Or launch a completely inaccurate scare campaign written for a different policy altogether. Or argue over who’s “fault” it all is. Because those things are obviously way more important than, I don’t know, the future of our environment, our economy, or the lives of the 850 utterly desperate men detained at our behest for years.

Of course, we’ve always assessed the political impact of events or announcements but there was a time when we used to make some attempt to understand what they meant first, or what might be done about them.

But much of the response to each of these politics-fuelled crises ignored the substance and immediately reacted to, and assessed their impact on ... politics.

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When the Papua New Guinean supreme court brought down its widely anticipated decision that the Manus offshore detention centre was illegal, everyone’s first reaction was to pass the buck.

The latest agreement for processing on Manus Island was struck by Kevin Rudd, but Labor’s Richard Marles immediately said the mess was all the government’s fault.

“We have seen a complete failure on the part of the Turnbull government to properly negotiate resettlement arrangements with PNG and to negotiate resettlement arrangements with third country options,” he thundered.

“The Manus facility was established to serve as a circuit breaker ... It was never intended to serve as a punitive place of indefinite detention.”

But according to the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, it was all Labor’s fault.

“Well this arrangement obviously was put together by the Rudd government back when they lost control of our borders and thousands of people were arriving,” he said.

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And when a few Labor MPs reiterated their long-standing opposition to the policy, Dutton insisted the real issue at stake here was “a leadership” question for Bill Shorten. Yep, right, that would be the big question.

He said the refugees on Manus were PNG’s problem. PNG said they were Australia’s problem.

Meanwhile, commentators busied themselves with the really critical conundrums – was this a crisis for Malcolm Turnbull or in fact a “political gift”? Because it was great for the Coalition to be talking about boats during an election campaign.

Even accepting the overriding policy priorities of both major parties to keep people smugglers out of business, these responses are pathetic. Yes, the government has been working furiously behind the scenes to try to find another country that will take refugees from Manus and Nauru, and if Labor was in government it would be doing the same thing. But the Coalition appears to be ruling out options with at least some chance of success, such as resettling refugees in a third country from where they could apply to come to Australia after a period of time, or New Zealand’s long-standing offer to take some refugees, apparently because a solution cannot even be contemplated if there’s a risk even one more boat might come. The political scoreboard is the top priority.

Of course, there aren’t easy answers, but a solution would surely be simpler if we just concentrated on finding it, rather than apportioning political blame.

And on the same day Labor released its climate change plan, which retreated on so many aspects of the former emissions trading scheme that even the Business Council of Australia said it could provide a bridge towards bipartisanship. One of the Coalition’s own advisers concedes the scheme Labor is proposing for the electricity sector is almost identical to the one Turnbull championed as a “greener, cheaper, smarter” option in 2009, and exactly what everyone thinks the “Direct Action” plan will be morphed into when it is reviewed in 2017 – if the Coalition actually wants to achieve its greenhouse gas reduction targets, that is.

Did the prime minister, who promised to respect the intelligence of the electorate, concede any of these things? As his predecessor might have said, nope, nope, nope. He and his ministers dusted off the same old, factually incorrect scare campaign that Tony Abbott was using – misused the same modelling data to sprout the same incorrect assertions about the possible cost of Labor’s scheme, and cranked up the same lines about “big thumping electricity tax” that is about to impoverish Australian households. Stay tuned for dire predictions about Whyalla and lamb roasts. The Daily Telegraph has already responded to the semblance of a climate policy with a full front page picture of a masked ghoul, screaming “Horror Show”, because a “nightmare” was returning. Apparently if we have no credible climate policy we can all sleep easy.